Trump rape case: Judge denies former president's last-minute offer to provide DNA

• A federal judge denied Trump's last-minute offer to provide DNA in the rape case against him.

• Last week, Trump offered a sample to be tested against DNA found on E. Jean Carroll's dress.

• But Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said the deadline for exchanging evidence has long passed.

A federal judge on Wednesday denied former President Donald Trump's last-minute offer to provide a DNA sample to be compared against the dress of his accuser.

Longtime Elle magazine advice columnist E. Jean Carroll has two separate lawsuits against Trump, both connected to her claim that Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. Trump has denied Carroll's allegations.

Soon after she filed her first lawsuit against Trump in 2019, claiming defamation, Carroll's attorneys asked Trump for a DNA sample to compare against male skin fragments found on the dress Carroll says she wore during the alleged assault. But Trump declined to turn over a sample until last week.

Last week, Trump's legal team made a last-minute offer to provide a DNA sample, just two months before the first trial is scheduled to start. But only on the condition that Carroll turn over the appendix of the lab report on the dress, which would contain the DNA genome of the unidentified male DNA on the dress.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan denied that offer on Wednesday.

Kaplan wrote in his ruling that Trump offered "no persuasive reason" about why he didn't make the DNA offer in a timely fashion, and "failed to demonstrate good cause to reopen discovery" long after the deadline to exchange evidence had passed.

Both Carroll lawsuits have April trial dates and may end up being tried at the same time.

"There is no justification for imposing Mr. Trump's new proposal on Ms. Carroll now that she has prepared for a trial on the entirely justified basis that there will be no DNA evidence," Kaplan wrote.

Kaplan has previously complained about Trump's legal team holding up the case with delay after delay. Most recently, he declined their request for a six-week delay on Carroll's second lawsuit, which alleges battery and a second act of defamation. The judge instead agreed to push the trial back just one week.

"Starting down the DNA road at this point almost inevitably would lead to further delay for sampling, testing, expert report writing, and depositions of experts. It almost surely would delay the trial again," Kaplan wrote.

Attorneys for Trump and Carroll declined to comment on the judge's ruling Wednesday.

Carroll's attorney, Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge), wrote in a letter to the court last week that the offer from Trump was a "bad faith" delay tactic.

She said in her letter that while she and other lawyers first asked for Trump's DNA in February 2020, they eventually decided not to press him on the matter since the fight would likely hold up the case, which was a matter of concern because of their client's advanced age. Carroll is 79 years old.

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